In the currently envisaged 3GPP LTE Rel-10 or LTE Advanced (LTE-A) multi-carrier system, carrier or spectrum aggregation (CA), where two or more Component Carriers (CCs) are aggregated, is used in order to support wider transmission bandwidths. The CC aggregated can be contiguous or noncontiguous in the same frequency band (Intra-band CA) or be in non-contiguous frequency bands. A LTE-A User Equipment (UE) can receive and transmit control and data signaling on multiple CCs. In order to enable the UE to communicate with the network on multiple CCs with reduced latency and power consumption, the network follows a multi-step process where the UE may be pre-configured for possible reception and/or transmission on multiple CCs using a long term configuration message and possibly a subset of those CCs are dynamically activated for short time periods to enable the UE to receive and/or transmit large data bursts with subsequent de-activated of the subset of the CCs when not needed.
The various aspects, features and advantages of the invention will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon careful consideration of the following Detailed Description thereof with the accompanying drawings described below. The drawings may have been simplified for clarity and are not necessarily drawn to scale.